Email Marketing Best Practices

Before jumping head first into the warm inviting waters of email marketing it’s important to know about two potential pitfalls that can seriously undermine your efforts. We call these “email marketing gotchas”.

Gotcha #1 is when your email campaign results in bounce backs from bad email addresses. This will bombard your email servers, call the integrity of your distribution list into question, and (worst case scenerio) halt the delivery of your email campaign. This brings us to…

Rule #1:Don’t buy or share lists.

In other words, keep your email distributions lists home-grown. You can use Express Email Marketing to create a signup form, or build your list through site surveys (our online survey application – no longer offered), and if your contact information is older than six months, send a permission email to make sure that the person still exists and wants your content.

Gotcha #2 is when you email different content; newsletters, weekly specials, seasonal promotions, etc, without obtaining explicit permission for each type. This can cause contacts to invoke the “report spam” or “opt-out” options that federal law requires be included in every email.

Rule #2:Don’t send unwanted information.

To help keep opt-in preferences straight you can automatically assign contacts to one or more predefined distribution groups.

That’s it. Just follow these rules and you’ll be golden.

Click here to see plans and prices for Express Email Marketing from Nerd Warehouse (cheaper than GoDaddy.com for the exact same thing).